From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Mar 02 2003 - 08:57:25 MST
On Sat, 1 Mar 2003, Reason wrote:
> See my other post on this point. We need to increase funding by managing,
> growing and presenting demand for improvements in real anti-aging medicine.
Some of us, esp. David Kekich and Aubrey de Grey are trying to
do this (each based on their own expertise, David with TransVio
and Aubrey with his structuring of the fall IABG conference).
> Realistically, assuming that the US and more governments manage not to shut
> down all avenues of anti-aging research, we're looking at minor anti-aging
> medical technologies becoming available in ten years,
The US will not shut it down. I've just recently had a long conversation
with Natasha about how to prioritize ExI efforts. Unknown to most people
is the fact that China is going "over the edge" with regard to cloning research.
This was documented in a recent Nature article and I've had personal confirmations.
(We are talking more money than the principle investigators know how to effectively
spend...). The reasoning is simple. China has an aging population, the
elderly are very respected in Chinese culture (perhaps Taoist tradition??)
and so they should be cared for, *but* the Chinese "one child" policy for
many decades means there are too few children to care for the infirmed
elderly. The only solution for China is to find a way to make sure that
the elderly do not become "infirmed". Thus a flood of money into stem cell
research.
As I have made the argument that GM crops cannot be stopped -- anti-aging
research cannot be stopped as well. As Spock so well observed in
Star Trek II: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or
the one". The "deathist" bioethicists will fail.
My conclusion (and suggestion to Natasha) is that ExI should not focus
too much energy on dealing with anti-stem-cell/cloning efforts. It
is a question of inertia -- opinions in the U.S. or Europe are only
going to have a limited impact on global inertia.
> This is conditional on us winning the war of memes with the deathist bioethicists.
> If they convince the world that no-one should have anti-aging technology, that it's immoral
> and unimportant, that it will be legislated against, then the markets will
> never come into being. The research will never happen.
Highly unlikely to happen. I'll cite everything from personal self-interest
(the Ellison Medical Foundation) to the cultural self-interest (see China
above). We can be very annoyed with any deathists but they aren't going
to win in the long run (they would have to eliminate our instincts for
survival).
> So I see the problem
> as being a lack of funding, rather than a failing of human nature.
Agreed! I would only make a slight modification that one of the
major reasons for the lack of funding is that most people think
the problems cannot be solved -- we didn't go to the moon until
we went to the moon. In many respects what is lacking is someone
saying "let us go to the moon". Aging may be somewhat more complex
than going to the moon but it isn't *that* much more complex.
Robert
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